Recipe Anatomy
How a recipe is formatted can have a high impact on how useful, or even discoverable, it is to people. I developed my own standard which aims to make each recipe consistent, easily referenced during cooking, and still informative prior to or after cooking. Below I’ll share the main components that make up my recipes:
Elements
In each recipe, I ensure to color code references to time and temperature with blue and red respectively. This adds a visual marker to help quickly locate a key piece of information when busy in a kitchen. Moreover, there are bolded words that reference whole sections of ingredients, which makes skimming through instructions vastly easier than needing to skim through a list of ingredients that are already listed in the ingredient section.
I aim to have both Imperial and Metric measurements when possible to help with consistency. Plus, some recipes have some of each for different ingredients, and having both for all ingredients makes this less clumsy.
The main metadata I find useful is both how many servings the recipe provides. Some of my recipes are reduced to a single portion to help with multiplying by individuals served. The ultimate goal would be to have all my recipes like this, but it is extremely difficult in many circumstances (i.e., Focaccia).
A couple metadata I either don’t find as useful or are just a bit too difficult to do consistently are time and equipment. Any system for calculating time, especially in different cooking stages, falls apart pretty quickly when applied to more than a few recipes. Some can be done in stages across days, how much of extra prep time should be included, etc. Same for equipment, many tasks don’t strictly require one item over another (should I use a dutch oven or a stock pot if both work?).
Body
The minimum requirement for a fully functional recipe are two sections: ingredients and instructions. These are two distinct sections and one should not be repeated in another, i.e., an instruction step should not say something similar to “cut the onion, carrot, garlic, and tomato and mix together” - these ingredients are already in the ingredient section, this is just making the instruction step longer and longer and harder to read.
With ingredients, I opt for including how they should be prepped within this section. This couples the ingredient with its size or processing requirement, and thus can often times make creating a shopping list easier. Plus, it saves many, many words in the instructions steps and thus makes the overall recipe more concise.
Should every recipe explain the size an onion should be diced, or should there be a centralized reference for sizes and each ingredient references it? I opt for the latter. There is certainly a tradeoff, because there is an inverse relationship between a recipe being beginner-friendly and reference-friendly. I resent having to skim through a paragraph of text for each instruction step - if a task requires more in depth explanation, refer to another source.
Basically it comes down to not believing an individual recipe should be the source of a technique that is not specific to the recipe.
The instructions section is broken into three categories:
- Prep: The assembly of ingredients that can be done ahead of time, and can be easily paused before continuing to the next section.
- Cook: The work involved in constructing the dish, and cannot be easily paused before continuing to the next section.
- Finish: The last minute touches that should be done immediately before serving.
Context
Besides the main body, I usually include some optional extra context for a recipe. This section consists of five different categories:
- What: A simple and concise description of this item and its background.
- Why: Reasoning behind this recipe being good or effective.
- Components: Specific information regarding key ingredients, e.g., seasonality.
- Tips: Good to know info that isn’t strictly necessary to complete the instructions.
- Storage: Information on how to store and how long it will last.